


A Dream without End

by AnnaCipactli12



Series: Hearts Beneath the Ocean [1]
Category: Game of Thrones (TV), The Tudors (TV)
Genre: Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen, Major AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-03
Updated: 2016-07-03
Packaged: 2018-07-19 19:11:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7373986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnnaCipactli12/pseuds/AnnaCipactli12
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Major AU. After Daenerys becomes Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, she spares Tommen and sends him to England to marry another "incestuous bastard"; Mary believes their union will be happy because he is broken like her, and the two can rely on each other the way her grandparents relied on each other, but she soon realizes she's entered a new nightmare.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Dream without End

 

 _“I loved you the first time_  
_I loved you the last time_  
_Yo soy la princesa_  
_comprende mis white lines_  
_Cause I'm yourjazz singer_  
_and you’re my cult leader_  
_I love you forever, I love you forever …”_  
**~Ultraviolence official video by Lana del Rey**

Things didn’t always go the way I wanted them to go. My husband is a cruel lord who sulks all day looking at the woman he once loved. That woman was vaporized thanks to my lady mother who forced him to give up his seat of power in favor of her.

  
_“Cersei of House Lannister, the First of her Name.”_ Is what they chanted when she was crowned, followed by the standard _“Long May she Reign.”_ She didn’t last long on the throne. The Dragon Queen came and her horde of Dothraki, Unsullied and Westerosi allies sacked the cities and burned the Red Keep, where my husband was about to commit suicide.

You might be wondering how is it that a boy, a simple boy, with no malice in his body could have become so cruel? I cannot answer that. Not without telling you the story of Ice and Fire. It is long and dreary, filled with heartbreak and senseless death, so I will spare you the details and just say that after she took the throne, Daenerys killed Queen Cersei and saved Tommen from certain death by forcing him to bend the knee (yet again to another woman).

Since I was in England in need of a husband, my father saw it fit to wed me to him. He was a lord without lands. His grandmother-in-law promised him Highgarden but after Daenerys was crowned, she changed her mind. No one in Westeros wanted to be close to him. I have to admit, I felt pity for him. Abomination or not, he was a boy. Just a boy. My age and like me, alone in the world.

It didn’t take me long to realize what an idiot I was. People in the Church held their laughter but I could hear some of them sniggering. Some whispered behind our backs during the feast when we danced about how he’d be unable to penetrate my maidenhead since Tommen Baratheon was not a Baratheon but a Lannister -and a poor Lannister at that.

His uncle was there and expressed his sympathies but Tommen had no more empathy to give. His family had done nothing but control and strip him of his humanity.

I told him that it would be fine, that we would be fine. I wanted to add that from now on, things would be perfect. We would live happily ever after just like in fairy tales and together we would prove to the world what Lannisters and Tudors are made of. But my father’s dog came then and baited us. He asked me if I knew what cunninglus meant. I obviously did. I had never done it, but I knew what it was. I had always been a curious child and heard many of the servants talk but I played the perfect fool so he could make fun of me and tell my father what a perfect, innocent _girl_ I was.

Tommen just stood there like a statue, unmoving, and uncaring. But I was too enchanted by my own wedding -something I never thought would occur following my father’s declaration that I was a bastard born of incest -and forcing me to sign that dreaded Oath- to care.

When our wedding night came, I realized what a fool I was. Good-hearted fool, but a fool nonetheless. After Tommen did what he did, he whispered in my ear **“Margaery”.** I was a living girl and he loved her more than me.

He had nothing to mourn her by except his perfect memory of her, so, he commissioned a portrait When he hung it next to our wedding bed in Hudson, I was furious and told my father but he told me: _“Wives don’t get to choose. They obey.”_ And went on to lecture me, using my stepmother, Jane Seymour, as an example. _“She obeys. Be as her motto Mary, she is a credit to her gender. Or be nothing at all, and complain as your mother always complained. You will get nothing out of shouting. The more you shout, the more you remind me of her and even **her.”**_ He said underlining the last word. I didn’t need to ask whom he meant. My mother’s defiance had wounded my father, but Anne’s alleged love affairs had wounded him even more.

I kept my peace, returned to my husband as the obedient, young woman that I was and did my duty for the next decade.

A year after I gave birth to my first child, I heard countless rumors about the North. How the King there and his ruling consort, Queen Sansa of House Stark, had fended off the White Walkers, with the help of the Dragon Queen. To me these were just rumors but to Tommen they were real. He prayed and fasted more than any person I knew. Like a priest, he read the bible and came to believe in it more than the Seven Pointed Star. He reached the conclusion that the Seven were a representation of a higher power and that higher power had saved him from certain death and given him a second chance. I bit my tongue every time he quoted scripture to correct him about his awful Latin and mistranslations, and pointing out that it was the Dragon Queen that saved him, not the Seven and most certainly, not God.

 _God does not save imbeciles._ I thought, as he went on.

It was always the same routine. I would rise up, greet him, pray with him, break fast then dine and go back with my ladies, and attend other domestic duties.

Tommen wants a wife. Not a Consort like he did with Margaery. Just a wife and I must be one for him. But hard as I tried (and Lord knows that I did), I always came in last. It is hard to compete when your competition is already dead. Margaery remains eternal, perfectly poised and young, while I will grow old someday and he will look to whores who remind him of his one true love.

One day he was gentle and he asked me how I felt but it didn’t last because out of nowhere, he brought up the subject of my half-siblings. “Did you know that Elizabeth can knit and sow as well as any royal Consort and that she reads in two more languages than you did at her age, or did you know that she doesn’t ask stupid questions but stays quiet when people speak, waiting for her turn like a good spouse?”  
Where had that come from? I asked Tommen why he was so cruel to me, I did what my father asked of me, what he asked of me. _“It isn’t fair. I gave you a son.”_ I said, releasing tears that hadn’t been released since my mother’s death.

“Aye, you have. But life isn't fair, honey.” He gripped my arm.

“You are hurting me.”

He whispered in my ear: “The only thing you have ever given me is grief. Most women give their husbands a horde of children after their first year. You’ve just given me one. I wonder … is he going to die or be taken by the river goddess Melusina? Don’t think I haven’t heard the rumors.”

He was out of his mind. I tried to reason with him but he didn’t want to listen to reason.  I finally broke free and ran but before I reached the door he grabbed me and threw me on the bed. “Maybe this is my penance. Maybe I am paying for my parents’ sins. They always say that the innocent pay for the sinners, or something like that.”

“Stop it Tommen. You are not paying for anything. You were never at fault for what your mother did to Margaery. You couldn’t have known. No one could have known!”

“I could have prevented it. Many kings would not have flinched from sending their mothers to the scaffold. Your father sent your mother away for defying him and your first stepmother to her death for the same. I could have saved her.”

The revelation shocked me. There had never been any talk of the Queen of Thorns' granddaughter being pregnant. He laughed and said: “The High Septon had to persuade Margaery to lie with me after my inability to defend her when he imprisoned her and her brother thanks to my mother. We were going to keep it a secret” he positioned himself on top of me. I begged him to stop. I didn’t want us to lie together under these circumstances. “After the trial, I was going to do a walk of shame like my mother did. I had it all planned. My mother would be safe.”

“Tommen … you should have told your mother.” Was all I could say. It was stupid, I should have said something else but I could think of nothing else. “You could have prevented everything. I am sure she would have understood if she knew about her grandson. She loved you.” I said and brought a hand to his face but he pushed it away and then slapped me hard. It was the first time anyone had laid a hand on me. I always thought it would be my father, or one of his minions, not my husband.

“You want to know what it felt to have my heart ripped out?” I shook my head _. Please Jesus_ , I prayed mentally, don’t let me die. My husband was many things but he was no killer, but when a man was grief-stricken he was capable of everything.

“It feels something like this.” He impaled me. I screamed but he put a hand on my mouth. “I wanted to take my life and jump from the highest window in the Red Keep but my mother arrived just in time. After she died, I wanted to jump too but the Dragon Queen thanks to the mercy of my great uncle prevented me.” He stabbed me again. “Mother always said, a king never strikes his lady but she never specified since it was always Joffrey who beat up girls and blinded horses. Me? I was the fool, the tool.” He began laughing. “It is funny, really. The one who would have given the Seven Kingdoms a dynasty to last a thousand years beaten by two women and the only woman who could have delivered me from evil, died because I was unable to vanquish it.”

 _Please let it end soon._ But soon never came. When Tommen finished he called his servants.

When a King goes to visit his Queen, his servants dress him and torch bearers follow him until he reaches her chambers, then they leave until they are called by the yeomen of the rose. Everything a king does is a ritual. He is after all the head of state, the future on which a nation is built. If he fails to do his duty, his dynasty dies and civil war breaks out. I heard how my father would stay long hours in my mother’s chambers, long after he had done the deed. After she stopped having her courses, he still visited her and moved his chambers closer to her. It wasn’t sex he was after as much as it was royal company.  
_“Mistresses come and go”_ She’d tell me, _“but a wife is forever.”_

But when Tommen stabbed me repeatedly and left my room, I felt nothing but used goods. I was not his partner. I was not his Consort. I was his chew toy, to be played with or tossed away if he so pleased.

“Maybe he will get better.” Susan said and one of my new ladies nodded her head. But I doubted it.

I thought I was marrying a golden prince, a young man who would treat me right but I had married my father.

I hung my head low whenever he visited me until one day I had enough. That was the day after our daughter was born. I gave birth to twins. It was a rarity but it happened and it proved to be a joyous occasion because one of them was a boy -and naturally it was my little lord who got the most attention.  
I wasn’t a princess any longer but to many I still was, and there were certain rules that women had to follow and one of these was the ceremony of churching, but he wouldn’t hear it. He said he wanted me back with him and took my child from me (the only child that has ever been truly mine) when he saw me breastfeeding her. “Ladies don’t do that.” He said, but I remarked I was not a lady but a Princess and I could do whatever I pleased.

"These are my lands. Ask my tenants whom they prefer, whom they respect.” He gave my little lady to the wet nurse and advanced towards me but I didn’t back away. I looked him right in the eye and held my ground.

He didn’t hit me but he did something worse. He took my children from me. I didn’t see them for five years. When he brought them to court, they were always with their governors and governesses. I wasn’t even allowed to wave at them.

**~o~**

My day finally came when my father married his sixth wife. She and Tommen saw eye to eye on many things but they disagreed on one. “Lady Mary, it is so good to see you again. My mother served your lady mother. She spoke so highly of you both. I look forward to many visits from you and your children. My sisters and I enjoy the company of children.” She said and held my hands and then looked at Tommen who had no choice but to nod his head.  
My children were returned to me the next day. It was the greatest day of my life. I didn’t care what the future would bring from that point onwards. I had my children with me, that was all that mattered. But that night I heard Tommen in the room next to mine and just as I had always feared, he was with another woman.

 _“This is how it felt._ ” Tommen had left the door open so I could hear, and so I could feel the pain he felt every day when he opened his eyes and saw that I wasn’t his precious Tyrell rose.

This hurt me more than anything he had done. This kind of backstabbing was something I wasn’t prepared for. I knew the day would come but I didn’t think it would be so soon.

If it weren’t for my three children and the one that was under way, I would have starved myself or something. I know what you are thinking. You should have done it. But do you want to know the truth? I was afraid. Not so much of hell. My mother had instilled the fear of God in me -and it is a fear I still carry with me- but after Tommen, I came to fear this life more than the next. You can judge me all you want but when you are married to someone who has more demons than you and you have to compete with his dead wife, you become just as desperate as me. What I was really afraid of is my children. What would happen to them after I died? Who would take care of them? Tommen? Don’t make me laugh.  
Tommen can barely take care of himself and knowing my lord father, he would convince him to put them in his custody and the last thing my family needs is two more carbon copies of my father. Lord knows that my half-brothers are already on their way to becoming crueler versions of Henry VIII.

I waited for him to arrive. I didn’t put much of a fight. I kept thinking about my future and my children’s future. I was so far beneath the line of succession and after I give birth to this child -if it is a boy- I would be even further. But I still envisioned myself seated on the throne with Reginald Pole acting as my Archbishop of Canterbury, putting the triple crown on my head, declaring me Queen of England. I was wearing bright purple and everything else about me was bright as well, including my smile which made others smile. There was my sister, Thomas Cranmer, the traitor’s son, Gregory Cromwell, and everyone else who mocked me. Their faces were steel and they shared conspiratorial looks. The throng of my subjects’ cries was drowned in a sea of tears and blood-curling screams as my enemies were tied to the stake and slowly burned before my eyes.

I knew then and there, before I opened my eyes, that everything I have been wishing will become true. And those who stand in my way, I will squash them like my grandmother squashed her enemies. _Nothing will stand in my way_.

I turn to Tommen then lower my gaze to my stomach. “I swear to God, I will protect you and I will do whatever is necessary to safeguard yours and your siblings’ futures.” I say. My husband is too drunk and too exhausted from his brown-haired, blue-haired whore to hear. All that comes from his mouth is loud snoring. “I will never let anyone hurt you. You will have everything that was promised to me since before my birth.” As I place my hand on my stomach, I feel the little one kick. He knows I will always protect him, and like his sister, he knows that he can always count on me.

I look at my husband’s beloved, immortalized in portrait. “You were his heart’s keeper.” I will never be able to beat her. No matter how many children I give Tommen, she will always win. “In a perfect world you and Tommen would have lived happily ever after and I would be married to a man who loves me. But this is not a perfect world. The wicked prosper and the good ones die in their name.” I steel my heart. “You are dead. I am alive. Tommen will always love you, but it is me he is with, and, it is me who will preserve his legacy and it is me who history will remember.” A smile danced on my lips. “And it is me who will lie beside him for all eternity.” With that I went to sleep.


End file.
